Dell 6000 Ram Question

Hi all, I just had a quick q about the ram speed that the Inspiron 6000 supports: I just bought a 512meg (i think) stick of Kingston ram @ 533MHz but when i took out the old cheapo 256MB that ran @ 400MHz and replaced it, it still ran at 400MHz. I went into bios, cannot change the speed of the ram yet most of the posts here suggest that 533MHz is compatible with the 6000?

 

actually it seems dell have found a way to screw that up. from what i know 533MHz is not supported on the i6000, but since your rams are backward compatible they will run at 400.

the extra bandwidth wont really make that much of a difference as long as you are still running in dual channel. So now you have 2x512?

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N6010: P4M 3.2G, 1GB Dual 400MHz, 60GB 7200RPM, ATI 9700M, 17" WXGA+
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My I6000 supports 533MHz RAM. Or else my BIOS is lying to me.

The processor that you order with the 6000 determines the Bus speed. If you order it with the Celeron chip -- or the Pentium M 715 Chip -- the Bus speed is 400MHz. However, if your laptop is configured with the 730, 750, or 760 Pentium M... it supports a 533MHz Bus.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Platypus

 

SPD will tell you what your rams are capable of. MEMORY will tell you what you are currently running at. and on CPU tab you can look at "bus speed" to know your CPU bus (it should be 4x the FSB)

for rams, note that you are using ddr, so the reported frequency is half what you actually bought. so 200 --> 400 ; 266 --> 533

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N6010: P4M 3.2G, 1GB Dual 400MHz, 60GB 7200RPM, ATI 9700M, 17" WXGA+
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Thanks Qwester. As you suggested, I downloaded and ran CPU-Z.

I hate to be ignorant, but (as you can see, I'm a newbie] ... exactly which tab/field will give me the data I'm looking for?


[fyi, I installed two 1GB DDR2-533 Transcend DIMMs in my laptop]

 

OK, here are some of my results:

CPU: Intel Pentium M 730, FSB 133Mhz, Bus Speed 532MHz
Memory: 199.5 Frequency
SPD: DDR2-SDRAM, 1024MBytes, Frequency 266MHz

So... I'm confused: does all this data really mean that my RAM is running at 400MHz? A posting on the Dell Forum (link is below) suggests the possibility that the CPU-Z readings might be flawed.

Does it matter that my chips are CL4? (I'm asking based on another thread)

fyi, the "memory configurator" on Kingston's website offers both the 400MHz and 533MHz chips when you choose the Inspiron 6000 in your search with the following comment:
"This system is configurable and can ship with either DDR2-400 (KTD-INSP6000/xx) or DDR2-533 (KTD-INSP6000A/xx). These are compatible, however when mixed they default to DDR2-400.
Per Dell, systems configured with the Celeron processor will only run DDR2-533 memory at 400MHz. "

Also, I found these two links:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_upgrade&message.id=42379&query.id=199766#M42379
http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=13314

Thanks for taking the time to educate me, Qwester. [ ]

 

From what cpu-z is reporting it looks like yout are running at 400MHz. Is it possible the cpu-z is wrong? Possible, but I doubt it, DDR2 has been out for a while and the 915 chipset is listed among the supported chips.

But no need to be bummed out. From testing ran on systems that supported 533MHz, there was no difference between 533 in single or dual channel, so as long as you are running at 400 dual channel you are getting as much performance as the cpu can offer.

CL4 refers to latency. so that is a latency of 4 cycles. there are multiple kinds of latencies and each refers to a specific case. the larger the CL the worse (this means your rams wait 4 clock cyles before they proceed to the next step), but usually the faster the ram the larger the latency ... something to do with the electronic components and how fast you can go from one state to another (0 to 1), while still maintaining stability and avoiding errors. Not gonna shower you with the technicalities [ ]
And in answer to your question latency has nothing to do with the frequency (MHz) at which your rams are running.

[EDIT]: concerning those benchmarks ran by a fellow user, I am not gonna relly on them since I don't know how he did the testings, minor things will affect the result greatly. (all the numbers he provided are a bit too low in my opinion. I would expect more bandwidth from the RAMs he has)
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N6010: P4M 3.2G, 1GB Dual 400MHz, 60GB 7200RPM, ATI 9700M, 17" WXGA+
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